Friday, June 12

a lackadaisical attitude

Korean papers are always printing these stories about foreign teachers being drunk and stupid. I want to say they're exaggerated but the majority of non-Koreans I've met here have been obnoxious assholes.

“I heard the teacher sometimes uses words like ’shit’ and ’shut up’. When the teacher is in a bad mood he tosses out the book. I heard one day he had the children write ‘I don’t want to study’ 100 times. It’s just so bizarre.”

40-year old Ilsan housewife Ms. Kim, a mother of two, didn’t know what to do.

With native-speaker English teachers increasing in number doubts about their character remain. There qare of course teachers who take a lackadaisical attitude to lessons or end them when they feel like it and others who have forged credentials.

According to the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology on the 11th, there were 2,456 native speaker English teachers in public schools nationwide at the end of September 2006, and that increased to 3,693 in 2007. Last year that increased by over 1,700 to reach 5,417 by the end of September.

The increase of 3,000 people in two years is part of the rapid expansion policy, but there continue to be cases of native-speaker teachers who have poor credentials or characters.

Yonhap News learned from parents and teachers of middle school D in Jangan-gu, Suwon, where a native-speaker teacher from the United Kingdom came to school drunk and caused a disturbance.

The drunken teacher began teaching sex education to the students in words they could not understand, saying “the reason I’m not married is I don’t want to have kids like you,” and “Dokdo is Japanese.”

An English teacher named Choi who works at a high school in Jeollanam-do said, “they don’t know the basic purpose of education. During lesson song times they just sing songs over and over, 10 or 20 times. I totally fail to see how you can learn English through pop songs.”